Chasing Down a GPS Blip to a Stolen iPhone

The No. 7 train, where a high-speed chase to recover a stolen iPhone took place in April, runs above Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

May 3, 2013

Crime Scene

By MICHAEL WILSON

The woman was talking on her iPhone, and never saw coming her induction into a large and growing subset of crime victims. But there it happened shortly after noon on April 15, on a busy corner of Main Street in Flushing, Queens. A teenager zipped past, snatching the phone out of her hand and kept running.

Devices like hers were stolen 16,000 times last year in New York City. But what happened on this afternoon was anything but commonplace. The closest comparison that leaps to mind is a classic chase scene from a 1971 thriller.

The teenager, soon out of sight, had every reason to believe his getaway was whistle clean. The woman, with just as many reasons to believe that was the last she would see of her phone, flagged a police officer, who put a call over the radio with a description of the young man wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt. Another officer pulled out his own iPhone, and together with the victim, logged into the Find My iPhone feature, which should work if the thief had not turned the victim’s phone off.

He had not. A telltale dot appeared on the screen of the officer’s phone. The victim’s phone was nearby, at 126th Street and Roosevelt Avenue.

“That’s a block away,” Police Officer Haaris M. Hamid, 28, said. He got behind the wheel of an unmarked car, his sergeant beside him. “I can get there and get the guy,” the officer said.

They arrived at the corner where the phone should have been, under an elevated stop on the No. 7 train. The officer and the sergeant looked around and then ran upstairs. Nothing. A train had just pulled away.

Officer Hamid called his colleague with the Find My iPhone feature and asked him to refresh the search. This time, it came up at 111th Street and Roosevelt.

The thief had to be on the subway.

They ran back downstairs to the car. The chase was on. Officer Hamid, his car siren blaring, wove through traffic and blew through intersections while the sergeant called out on the radio, looking for a means of stopping the train.

They arrived at the 111th Street station, still lagging behind the subway, and lingered long enough to make sure the people exiting the station did not include the suspect. They raced on, to the 103rd Street stop. Same thing: train leaving, no yellow hoodies.

Onward the officer drove, around cars beneath the subway tracks, like Gene Hackman’s character, Detective Popeye Doyle, in “The French Connection.” Of course, Popeye was after a cop-killing henchman for a drug smuggler, while Officer Hamid was chasing a teenager who had stolen a woman’s iPhone. But, as they say, the city has changed.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy,’ ” Officer Hamid, a seven-year police veteran, recalled. “It was seriously like a movie.”

A police captain called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the subway’s conductor was ordered to stop the train short of the next station, at Junction Boulevard. Officer Hamid, his sergeant, and a captain and a lieutenant who had joined the chase ran upstairs.

The conductor opened the door. “I was pretty much at the end of the line,” Officer Hamid said. “You’ve got to let the bosses go first and everything.”

The bosses and officer went car to car, looking at faces. Around the fourth car, Officer Hamid saw a young man whom he recognized from Flushing. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt. But still. “I go, ‘Sarge, that’s him.’ ”

Asked where he was coming from, the young man replied, “Brooklyn.” The No. 7 train makes exactly as many stops in Brooklyn as it does on Uranus.

Other passengers were watching with interest. So were the bosses. Officer Hamid hoped he had the right guy. The victim was on the street below, with other officers. Officer Hamid called down and asked someone to dial the victim’s phone.

“It rang,” Officer Hamid said. “In his back pocket. I was like, ‘Thank God.’ ” Passengers broke out in chatter, and the suspect’s eyes opened wide. “Like, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” Officer Hamid said. The suspect, Jordan Osborne, 19, had a yellow hooded sweatshirt in his backpack. He later told officers, “I took the phone to sell it,” according to a criminal complaint. “I was short on cash.” The police and the suspect left the train, which resumed its journey to Manhattan.

The suspect remains at Rikers Island while the case is pending.

Simple arithmetic suggests there were 42 other phones or electronic devices stolen in New York that day.